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NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has beamed home high-resolution color photos of its Red Planet landing site, showing terrain strikingly similar to the deserts of the American Southwest. Curiosity snapped the pictures with its 34-millimeter Mast Camera on...

It's a plot worthy of a Hollywood action movie: 40 years ago, the U.S. Navy carried out a daring mission to retrieve a top-secret film capsule that had settled more than 16,000 feet underwater on the ocean floor. At the time, the expedition was the d...

A weekend meteor shower lit up the night sky with a fiery shooting star display to delight of stargazers and space photographers around the world. The annual Perseid meteor shower peaked in the wee hours of Sunday (Aug. 12), providing a dazzling cele...

Two weeks before NASA's Curiosity rover lifted off for Mars last fall, one of the engineers who helped build the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft launched his own attempt at getting LEGO to produce a toy version of the six-wheeled rover. Eigh...

This is the weekend of the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower and most meteor forecasts predict the annual "shooting star" display will be at its best during the overnight hours of late Saturday into the early Sunday. The Perseid meteor shower ...

The sun fired off a spectacular eruption last weekend, and a NASA spacecraft captured amazing video of the violent solar outburst. A super-hot solar filament erupted in grand style Saturday (Aug. 4), arcing into space and connecting two huge sunspots...

Expect to see a lot of red-orange landscapes over the next few weeks, as the Curiosity rover beams back its first photos of the rugged Martian scenery. But why is Mars red, anyway? The simple explanation for the Red Planet's color is that its regolit...

As a doomed star spirals closer and closer to a black hole that's about to gobble it up, it lets out periodic bursts of light that scientists liken to dying screams. The star is falling into a gigantic black hole in the center of a distant galaxy tha...

NASA's huge Curiosity rover appears to have survived its harrowing Mars landing Sunday night in fine form, and it's now gearing up for its two-year mission on the Red Planet's surface. News that the 1-ton Curiosity rover touched down safely inside Ma...

PASADENA, Calif. — After 8 1/2 months crossing the millions of miles between planets, the biggest and most complex rover ever sent to another world is now on its final approach for a hair-raising touchdown on Mars. NASA's 1-ton Curiosity rover is set...

If NASA's newest Mars rover doesn't touch down safely Sunday night (Aug. 5), the future of Red Planet exploration could be thrown into serious doubt. The 1-ton Curiosity rover's main goal is to determine if Mars can, or ever could, support microbial ...

Even TV comedian Stephen Colbert isn't immune to the excitement surrounding the historic upcoming landing of NASA's newest rover on Mars. The huge Mars Science Laboratory, also known as the Curiosity rover, is slated to touch down on the Red Planet o...

Cosmic rays continue to puzzle scientists a century after the fast-moving particles were discovered. Austrian scientist Victor Hess first cottoned on to the existence of cosmic rays after a high-altitude balloon flight on Aug. 7, 1912. In the 100 yea...

Mars, our next-door neighbor in the solar system, hasn't given up many of its secrets yet. But when NASA's newest Mars rover, Curiosity, lands on the Red Planet next week, scientists hope to unlock a few more. The centerpiece of the Mars Science Labo...

How do you get people excited about a Mars rover that will attempt to land on the Red Planet in five days? You enlist the help of "Star Trek" icons Captain James T. Kirk and Wesley Crusher. Actors William Shatner and Wil Wheaton, two stars who made t...

Long landslides spotted on Saturn's moon, Iapetus, could help provide clues to similar movements of material on Earth. Scientists studying the icy satellite have determined that flash heating could cause falling ice to travel 10 to 15 times farther t...

A medium-size solar flare erupted from the sun this weekend, hurling a cloud of plasma and charged particles toward Earth on a cosmic path that is expected to deliver a glancing blow to our planet on July 31, according to space weather forecasters. T...

An unmanned Russian cargo ship parked itself at the International Space Station on Saturday night, in a second attempt to test an updated space docking system, NASA says. The robotic Russian Progress 47 spacecraft re-docked to the space station to te...

The huge NASA rover speeding toward an Aug. 5 landing on Mars may be the most capable and complex Red Planet explorer ever launched, but it's far from the first. The 1-ton Curiosity rover -- which will search for evidence that Mars is, or ever was, c...

Astronomers have discovered a weird compact spinning star whose rotation has sped up slightly, causing it to be hidden until now. The star is what's called a pulsar, made of the condensed remnants of a normal star that have been squeezed down to a mu...

Astronomers have discovered an alien solar system whose planets are arranged much like those in our own solar system, a find that suggests most planetary systems start out looking the same, scientists say. Researchers studying the star system Kepler-...

A daredevil leapt from a balloon more than 18 miles above the Earth on July 25, moving one step closer to a so-called "space jump" that would set the record for the world's highest skydive. Austrian adventurer Felix Baumgartner stepped out of his cus...

The controversial exoplanet Gliese 581g is the best candidate to host life beyond our own solar system, according to a new ranking of potentially habitable alien worlds. Gliese 581g shot to the top of the list -- which researchers at the University o...

An unmanned Japanese spaceship soared into orbit from an island launch site Friday (July 20), beginning a weeklong journey to deliver vital supplies to astronauts living on the International Space Station. The H-2 Transfer Vehicle-3 (HTV-3), nickname...

When NASA's newest rover, Curiosity, reaches Mars in about three weeks, it will not be the first to set its wheels on the Red Planet, but it will be the largest and most advanced robotic explorer that has ever been sent to our planetary neighbor. The...

A city-block size asteroid will fly by Earth this weekend well beyond the orbit of the moon, and you can watch it zip safely by live in an online webcast. The asteroid 2002 AM31 will make its closest approach to Earth on Sunday (July 22), when it wil...

Astronomers have discovered the universe's most ancient spiral galaxy yet, a cosmic structure that dates back roughly 10.7 billion years, a new study reveals. The galactic find, discovered by researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, comes as ...

Alien spacecraft and little green men remain elusive figures in the latest trove of official UFO files released July 12 by the UK government. There's no smoking gun anywhere in the 6,700 pages, which represent the ninth collection of government UFO f...

Friday the 13th proved to be lucky for at least one fan of the popular TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory. The hit CBS sitcom gave away a high-flying prize -- a free trip to space -- at the Comic-Con festivities in San Diego, according to news reports. Wh...

A former Google bigwig has his sights set on the heavens, leaving the search giant to join a company that aims to provide commercial and scientific missions to the moon. Jimi Crawford, who had been engineering director for the Google Books project si...

Top Stories from Space.com

Astronomers have discovered the largest and most luminous black hole ever seen — an ancient monster with a mass about 12 billion times that of the sun — that dates back to when the universe was less than 1 billion years old.

General Electric is taking a "small step" into sneaker design to commemorate the role -- or rather, sole -- it had in mankind's first "giant leap" on the moon. Forty-five years to the day, hour and minute after Apollo 11 moonwalkers Neil Armstrong an...

A new portrait of the Milky Way's neighbor, Andromeda, shows our twin galaxy as we've never seen it before -- thanks to a new instrument on Japan's Subaru telescope at the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The instrument, called the Hyper-Suprime Cam (HS...

A U.S. spaceflight company is hoping the third time's the charm in order to launch a brand-new rocket into space on its maiden flight on Sunday (April 21). After two delayed launch attempts, the privately built Antares rocket is once again poised to ...

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